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单选题Anyone who doubts that children are born with a healthy amount of ambition need spend only a few minutes with a baby eagerly learning to walk or a headstrong toddler starting to talk. No matter how many times the little ones stumble in their initial efforts, most keep on trying, determined to master their amazing new skill. It is only several years later, around the start of middle or junior high school, many psychologists and teachers agree, that a good number of kids seem to lose their natural drive to succeed and end up joining the ranks of underachievers. For the parents of such kids, whose own ambition is often inextricably tied to their children's success, it can be a bewildering, painful experience. So it's no wonder some parents find themselves hoping that, just maybe, ambition can be taught like any other subject at school. It's not quite that simple. "Kids can be given the opportunities to become passionate about a subject or activity, but they can't be forced," says Jacquelynne Eccles, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who led a landmark, 25-year study examining what motivated first-and seventh-graders in three school districts. Even so, a growing number of educators and psychologists do believe it is possible to unearth ambition in students who don't seem to have much. They say that by instilling confidence, encouraging some risk taking, being accepting of failure and expanding the areas in which children may be successful, both parents and teachers can reignite that innate desire to achieve. Figuring out why the fire went out is the first step. Assuming that a kid doesn't suffer from an emotional or learning disability, or isn't involved in some family crisis at home, many educators attribute a sudden lack of motivation to a fear of failure or peer pressure that conveys the message that doing well academically somehow isn't cool. "Kids get so caught up in the moment-to-moment issue of will they look smart or dumb, and it blocks them from thinking about the long term, says Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford. You have to teach them that they are in charge of their intellectual growth. " Over the past couple of years, Dweck has helped run an experimental workshop with New York City public school seventh-graders to do just that. Dubbed Brainology, the unorthodox approach uses basic neuroscience to teach kids how the brain works and how it can continue to develop throughout life. "The message is that everything is within the kids' control, that their intelligence is malleable," says Lisa Blackwell, a research scientist at Columbia University who has worked with Dweck to develop and run the program, which has helped increase the students' interest in school and turned around their declining math grades. More than any teacher or workshop, Blackwell says, "parents can play a critical role in conveying this message to their children by praising their effort, strategy and progress rather than emphasizing their 'smartness' or praising high performance alone. Most of all, parents should let their kids know that mistakes are a part of learning. " Some experts say our education system, with its strong emphasis on testing and rigid separation of students into different levels of ability, also bears blame for the disappearance of drive in some kids. "These programs shut down the motivation of all kids who aren't considered gifted and talented. They destroy their confidence," says Jeff Howard, a social psychologist and president of the Efficacy Institute, a Boston-area organization that works with teachers and parents in school districts around the country to help improve children's academic performance. Howard and other educators say it's important to expose kids to a world beyond homework and tests, through volunteer work, sports, hobbies and other extracurricular activities. "The crux of the issue is that many students experience education as irrelevant to their life goals and ambitions," says Michael Nakkual, a Harvard education professor who runs a Boston-area mentoring program called Project IF (Inventing the Future), which works to get low-income underachievers in touch with their aspirations. The key to getting kids to aim higher at school is to disabuse them of the notion that classwork is irrelevant, to show them how doing well at school can actually help them fulfill their dreams beyond it. Like any ambitious toddler, they need to understand that you have to learn to walk before you can run.

单选题Questions 6～10 Gail Pasterczyk, the principal of Indian Pines Elementary in Palm Beach County, Fla. , has added two or three new teaching positions each of the past three years. She"s adding two more teachers next year as well as replacing those she"ll lose to maternity leave, transfers, and retirement. She doesn"t know where the new teachers will come from, if the new hires will be any good, and where she"ll find room for all of them. Indian Pines already has 27 portable classrooms and is waiting to break ground on a two-story, 25-classroom addition. "When you start reducing class size, you"ve got to find more teachers, and you run out of space," she says. "That"s the reality. " Her school district, one of the nation"s largest, has sent recruiters across the country, and even to Mexico and the Philippines, to fill an expected 1,700 teaching vacancies before the fall. "We are in a race to keep the schools staffed," says Robert Pinkos, a Palm Beach County recruiter who will travel to Baltimore and Madrid next month to troll for teachers. Two and a half years after Florida voters adopted a constitutional amendment to reduce class sizes, Palm Beach County—and every other school district in the state—are tripping over a major stumbling block: There just aren"t enough good teachers to go around. With classes in kindergarten through third grade capped at 18 students, fourth through eighth held at 22, and high school limited to 25, the state will need to hire an estimated 29,604 new teachers by 2009—a prospect that has many people worried. "I have every reason to expect that the quality of teachers will suffer," says John Winn, the state"s education commissioner. Nationwide, 33 states now have laws that restrict class size. And the politically popular educational reform has proved successful in some areas, particularly among the lowest-performing students. In Burke County, N. C. , for example, discipline problems are down and test scores are up, even for the most disadvantaged students in the district. "On paper these kids should not be succeeding, but they are," says Susan Wilson, a former teacher and now director of elementary education in the rural county. But this success comes at a price. It means hiring more teachers, building more classrooms, and retraining teachers to work with smaller groups of students. And it means, critics maintain, that states pit their own districts against one another in the race to hire. "When you mandate class-size reduction statewide, the suburban schools tend to draw the best new teachers, and the more urban schools, which already have trouble attracting teachers, can"t attract the best candidates," says Steven Rivkin, an economics professor at Amherst College who has studied the effects of class-size reduction on teacher quality. Any gains from cutting class size could be undermined by hiring lower quality teachers. Resources. Proponents contend that the reform would be relatively pain-less if existing resources were managed well. "Hiring more teachers is only part of the solution," says Charles Achilles, one of the first researchers to study the effects of reducing class sizes. "The best programs for class-size reduction not only hire more teachers but reassign existing specialty teachers to get them back in the classroom. " Florida policymakers are trying to find their own way out of the class-size quandary. This month, the Legislature is considering a proposal to roll back some of the size limits in exchange for an increase in teacher pay. Gov. Jeb Bush, who opposed the constitutional amendment in 2002, argues that the compromise will attract more top-quality teachers to the state while reining in costs. Voters could see the proposed change on the ballot as early as September. In the meantime, recruiter Pinkos continues his search for new teachers, sometimes working 10-hour days. His pitch? "Palm Beach is very beautiful, but the small classes are one of the most attractive things I can tell them."

单选题Questions 1 to 5 are based on the following conversation.

单选题 Question 6-10 How many really suffer as a result of labor market problems? This is one of the most critical yet contentious social policy questions. In many ways, our social statistics exaggerate the degree of hardship. Unemployment does not have the same dire consequences today as it did in the 1930's when most of the unemployed were primary breadwinners, when income and earnings were usually much closer to the margin of subsistence, and when there were no countervailing social programs for those failing in the labor market. Increasing affluence, the rise of families with more than one wage earner, the growing predominance of secondary earners among the unemployed, and improved social welfare protection have unquestionably mitigated the consequences of joblessness. Earnings and income data also overstate the dimensions of hardship. Among the millions with hourly earnings at or below the minimum wage level, the overwhelming majority are from multiple-earner, relatively affluent families. Most of those counted by the poverty statistics are elderly or handicapped or have family responsibilities which keep them out of the labor force, so the poverty statistics are by no means an accurate indicator of labor market pathologies. Yet there are also many ways our social statistics underestimate the degree of labor-market- related hardship. The unemployment counts exclude the millions of fully employed workers whose wages are so low that their families remain in poverty. Low wages and repeated or prolonged unemployment frequently interact to undermine the capacity for self-support. Since the number experiencing joblessness at some time during the year is several times the number unemployed in any month, those who suffer as a result of forced idleness can equal or exceed average annual unemployment, even though only a minority of the jobless in any month really suffer. For every person counted in the monthly unemployment tallies, there is another working part-time because of the inability to find full-time work, or else outside the labor force but wanting a job. Finally, income transfers in our country have always focused on the elderly, disabled, and dependent, neglecting the needs of the working poor, so that the dramatic expansion of cash and in-kind transfers does not necessarily mean that those failing in the labor market are adequately protected. As a result of such contradictory evidence, it is uncertain whether those suffering seriously as a result of thousands or the tens of millions, and, hence, whether high levels of joblessness can be tolerated or must be countered by job creation and economic stimulus. There is only one area of agreement in this debate--that the existing poverty, employment, and earnings statistics are inadequate for one of their primary applications, measuring the consequences of labor market problems.

单选题Most growing plants contain much more water than all other materials combined. C. R. Barnes has suggested that it is as proper to term the plant a water structure as to call a house composed mainly of brick a brick building. Certain it is that all essential processes of plant growth and development occur in water. The mineral elements from the soil that are usable by the plant must be dissolved in the soil solution before they can be taken into the root. They are carried to all parts of the growing plant and are built into essential plant materials while in a dissolved state. The carbon dioxide from the air may enter the leaf as a gas but is dissolved in water in the leaf before it is combined with a part of the water to form simple sugars—the base material from which the plant body is mainly built. Actively growing plant parts are generally 75 to 90 percent water. Structural parts of plants, such as woody stems no longer actively growing, may have much less water than growing tissues. The actual amount of water in the plant at any one time, however, is only a very small part of what passes through it during its development. The processes of photosynthesis, by which carbon dioxide and water are combined-in the presence of chlorophyll and with energy derived from light-to form sugars, require that carbon dioxide from the air enter the plant. This occurs mainly in the leaves. The leaf surface is not solid but contains great numbers of minute openings, through which the carbon dioxide enters. The same structure that permits the one gas to enter the leaf, however, permits another gas—water vapor—to be lost from it. Since carbon dioxide is present in the air only in trace quantities (3 to 4 parts in 10,000 parts of air) and water vapor is near saturation in the air spaces within the leaf (at 80°F, saturated air would contain about 186 parts of water vapor in 10,000 parts of air), the total amount of water vapor lost is many times the carbon dioxide intake. Actually, because of wind and other factors, the loss of water in proportion to carbon dioxide intake may be even greater than the relative concentrations of the two gases. Also, not all of the carbon dioxide that enters the leaf is synthesized into carbohydrates.

单选题Everyone seems to hate America"s latest stab at immigration reform, which went before the full Senate this week. Immigrant groups think it offers little hope to low-skilled, mostly Hispanic would-be migrants. Right-wingers snarl that it is nothing but an "amnesty" for illegals. Companies, who it had been hoped would support the new compromise, hate it because it imposes bureaucratic burdens on employers. And the left is complaining because it fears it will depress low-end wages. It would be nice to be able to report that opposition across so full a spectrum is a sign that the bill is a well-crafted compromise. In fact, it may well tom out to be doomed. That would be a pity, because there are some good things in the proposal. Most important, it produces a reasonably fair solution to the problem of what to do about the 12 minion or so illegal immigrants already in America, most of them working hard at low-paid and disagreeable jobs. Deporting a population the size of Ohio"s is impossible, economically illiterate and morally wrong. The new bill would make the 12 million legal, and offer them a path, though a winding one, to full citizenship. The right doesn"t like this, of course, and points out that amnesties (which this really isn"t, given the fines and hurdles involved) have in the past drawn fresh waves of migrants. So the other side of the bargain gives conservatives everything they could wish for in terms of razor-wired fences, surveillance drones, armed border guards and a programme that will force companies to check the legality of their workers. Such measures are probably necessary to win support and rebuild trust in the immigration system. No bill would pass without them. The bad part of the deal is what happens to would-be immigrants once all those sensors and spy-planes are in place. The bill proposes a dual system. A guest-worker programme would allow 400,000 people a year to enter the country to work for two years, after which they must go home for a year, with a six-year cap on the total time they can spend in America. The other part is a new method of granting residence permits, carrying the right to work. Such "green cards" currently go mostly to relatives of American citizens or to people sponsored by an employer. The bill would bring in a "points" system for 380,000 people a year, similar to those in use in Canada and Australia. Permits for family members would be restricted, to cover only spouses and young children. Employers would have less ability to sponsor the people they need. There are several problems. One is that extended families help build vibrant communities in a way that guest workers don"t. Second, the government should not be in the business of telling companies whom they ought to him. There are ways round this, such as awarding points not for specific jobs, but still the problem is that most of the green cards will be used up by Indian software designers, Bosnian engineers or the similarly blessed. America does indeed need such folk, but it also needs legions of the less-skilled, too. That will continue to mean a large, poorly paid and constantly rotating alien underclass with little stake in American society. On May 23rd, the Senate voted to scale the guest worker programme back to 200,000. So the illegals will keep coming—except that now their journey will be still more dangerous and they will be even further beyond the law. The current bill is better than nothing; but unless it is improved, it will not solve the main problem of the illegals.

单选题{{B}}Directions:{{/B}} In this part of the test, you will hear several short talks and conversations. After each of these, you will hear a few questions. Listen carefully because you will hear the talk or conversation and questions {{B}}ONLY ONCE.{{/B}} When you hear a question, read the four answer choices and choose the best answer to that question. Then write the letter of the answer you have chosen in the corresponding space in your {{B}}ANSWER BOOKLET.{{/B}} {{B}}Questions 11—14{{/B}}

单选题 One day, drought may be a thing of the past, at least in any country not too far from the sea. Vast areas of desert throughout the world may for the first time come to life and provide millions of hectares of cultivated land where now nothing grows. By the end of this century this may not be mere speculation. Scientists are already looking into the possibility of using some of the available ice in the Arctic and Antarctic. In these regions there are vast ice-caps formed by snow that has fallen over the past 50,000 years. Layer upon layer of deep snow means that, when melted, the snow water would be pure, not salty as sea-ice would be. There is so much potential pure water here that it would need only a fraction to turn much of the desert or poorly irrigated parts of the world into rich farmland. And what useful packages would come in! It should be possible to hack off a bit of ice and transport it! Alternatively perhaps a passing iceberg could be captured. They are always breaking away from the main caps and floating around, pushed by currents, until they eventually melt and are wasted. Many icebergs are, of course, much too small to be towed any distance, and would melt before they reached a country that needed them anywhere. It would be necessary to harness one that was manageable and that was big enough to provide a good supply when it reached us. Engineers think that an iceberg up to 11 kilometres long and 2 kilometres wide could be transported if the tug pulling it was as big as a supertanker! Even then they would cover only 32 kilometres every day. However, once the iceberg was at its destination, say at one end of Hong Kong harbour, more than 7,000 million cubic metres of water could be taken from it! That would probably be more than enough for Hong Kong even in the hottest summer! But no doubt a use could be found for it. Apparently, scientists say, there would not be too much wastage in such a journey. The larger the iceberg, the slower it melts, even if it is towed through the tropics. This is because when the sun has a bigger area to warm up, less heat actually gets into the iceberg. The vast frozen center would be unaffected. Even with the giant tug that would have to be available to tow an iceberg seven miles long, the voyage would take many months from the Antarctic to Hong Kong, for example, but as stronger engines are built and more is known about sea currents, the journey could get shorter and shorter and thus the wastage less and less. Airline pilots have learnt to use jet streams ten miles above the earth to increase speed and save fuel so, surely, a boat towing an iceberg could make use of fast-flowing currents and avoid warmer water.

单选题Just as human history has been shaped by the rise and fall of successive empires, so the computer industry has, in the few decades of its existence, been dominated by one large company after another. During the mainframe era, IBM wore the crown. But it fumbled the transition to smaller machines in the personal-computer era, and the throne was usurped by Microsoft. Now, at the dawn of the new era of Internet services, Google is widely seen as the heir to the kingdom. As the upstart has matured into a powerful industry giant, the suggestion that "Google is the new Microsoft" has become commonplace in computing circles. Is it true? The comparison is both a compliment and a reproach. It is a compliment because it implies that Google has now become the company that defines the environment in which other technology firms operate, just as IBM and Microsoft once did. As with Microsoft in its heyday, Google is the technology firm where the smartest geeks aspire to work; it embodies the technological zeitgeist; and it is a highly regarded company that has become a household name. But the comparison is also a reproach, because it highlights growing concern that Google is now powerful for its own good, or that of the industry, or indeed that of the world at large. For many people, Google provides the front door to the internet. For many online businesses, their position in its search ranking—the workings of which are a closely guarded secret—is a matter of life or death. Too much power is thus concentrated in Google"s hands, say critics, including Microsoft"s Bill Gates. Microsoft and other big internet firms, including eBay, Amazon and Yahoo!, are now said to be negotiating various alliances in order to provide a counterweight to the new behemoth. Smaller firms feel even more vulnerable. As soon as Google says it is moving into a particular market, small fry in that market now dart for cover, unless they are lucky enough to be acquired by Google. Yet there are some crucial ways in which Google differs from Microsoft. For a start, it is a far more innovative company, and its use of small, flexible teams has so far allowed it to remain innovative even as it has grown. Microsoft, in contrast, has stagnated as a result of its size and dominance. It is least innovative in the markets in which it faces the least competition—operating system, office software and web browser—though it is, curiously, still capable of innovating in markets in which it has strong rivals (notably video gaming). More important, however, are the differences that suggest that Google will not be able to establish an IBM—or—Microsoft-style lock on the industry. IBM"s dominance was based on its ownership of the proprietary hardware and software of its mainframe computers. In the PC era hardware became commodity and Microsoft established a lucrative monopoly centered on its proprietary operating system, Windows. But in the new era of internet services, open standards predominate, rivals are always just a click away, and there is far less scope for companies to establish a proprietary lock-in. Try to avoid using Microsoft"s software for a day, particularly if you work in an office, and you will have difficulty; but surviving a day without Google is relatively easy. It has strong competitors in all the markets in which it operates: search, online advertising, mapping, software services, and so on. Large firms such as Yahoo!, which previously farmed searches out to Google, have switched to other technologies. Google"s market share in search has fallen from a high of around 80% to around 50% today. Perhaps the clearest evidence that Google"s continued dominance is not inevitable in the fate of Alta Vista, the former top dog in internet search. Who remembers it to today? Without a proprietary lock-in to protect its dominant position, Google will have to work hard to stay on top. And that, ultimately, is where the comparison with Micorsoft breaks down. Google may be the nearest thing to the new Microsoft of the internet era, and the two companies clearly regard each other as their main rivals. But one of the best things about the internet age is that it may well not end up being dominated by a single, Microsoft-like giant at all.

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单选题Which of the following statements can be inferred from the sentence "Alas, such interviews can fall foul of America's tight rules on stock market flotations, which are designed to prevent companies from hyping their stock ahead of a listing" in Paragraph 2?

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单选题Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following news.

单选题Questions 27-30

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单选题 How can you find what is going on inside a person's body—without opening the patient up? Regular X-rays can show a lot. CAT scans can show even more. They can give a three- dimensional view of body organs. What is a CAT scan? CAT stands for Computerized Axial Tomography. It is a special X-ray machine that obtains a 360-degree picture of a small area of a patient's body. Doctors use X-rays to study and diagnose diseases and injuries within the body. X-rays can locate foreign objects inside the body or take pictures of some internal organs—if special substances such as dyes of special liquids are added to the organs to be X-rayed. A CAT scanner, however, uses a beam of X-rays to give a cross-sectional view of a specific part of the body. A free beam of X-rays is scanned across the body and rotated around the patient from many different angles. A computer analyzes the information from each angle and produces a clear cross-sectional image on a screen. This image is then photographed for later use. Several cross-sections, taken one after another, can give clear "photos" of the entire body or of any body organ. The newest CAT scanners can even give clear images of active, moving organs, just as a fast-action camera can "stop the action", giving clear images of what appears only mistily to the eye. And because of the 360-degree pictures, CAT scans show 3-dimensional views of organs in a manner that was once only revealed during surgery or autopsy (examining a dead patient). Too much exposure to X-rays can cause skin bums, cancer or other damage to the body. Yet CAT scans actually don't expose the patient to more radiation than conventional X-rays do. CAT scans can also be done without injecting dyes into the patient, so they are less risky than regular X-ray procedures. CAT scans provide accurate, detailed information. They can detect such a thing as bleeding inside the brain. They are helping to save lives.

单选题Questions 26-30 Let children learn to judge their own work. A child learning to talk does not learn by being corrected all the time; if corrected too much, he will stop talking. He notices a thousand times a day the difference between the languages he uses and the language those around him use. Bit by bit, he makes the necessary changes to make his language like other people. In the same way, when children learn to do all the other things they learn to do without being taught--to walk, run, climb, whistle, ride a bicycle—compare those performances with those of more skilled people, and slowly make the needed changes. But in school we never give a child a chance to find out his own mistakes for himself, let alone correct them. We do it all for him. We act as if we thought that he would never notice a mistake unless it was pointed out to him, or correct it unless he was made to. Soon he becomes dependent on the teacher. Let him do it himself. Let him work out, with the help of other children if he wants it, what this word says, what answer is to that problem, whether this is a good way of saying or doing this or not. If it is a matter of right answers, as it may be in mathematics or science, give him the answer book. Let him correct his own papers. Why should we teachers waste time on such routine work? Our job should be to help the child when he tells us that he can"t find the way to get the right answer. Let"s end this nonsense of grades, exams, marks. Let us throw them all out, and let the children learn what all educated persons must someday learn, how to measure their own understanding, how to know what they know or do not know. Let them get on with this job in the way that seems sensible to them. With our help as school teachers if they ask for it. The idea that there is a body of knowledge to be learnt at school and used for the rest of one"s life is nonsense in a world as complicated and rapidly changing as ours. Anxious parents and teachers say, "But suppose they fail to learn something essential, something they will need to get in the world?" Don"t worry! If it is essential, they will go out into the world and learn it.

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单选题Questions 19-22